I hope this will be of interest to all of my small business owner friends.

A Quick Overview of Search Engine Strategies
SES is Danny Sullivan’s traveling Search Engine Marketing seminar that takes place in different parts of the U.S. throughout the year. This week, the seminar comes to San Jose, CA. The five day long event is packed with sessions led by some of the industry’s best-known experts. Both search marketers and business owners attend, taking their pick of the sessions they most want to sit in on. The complete schedule of events is full of presentations on topics that are of tremendous importance to any business owners, and anyone present at SES San Jose is going to learn a ton in the space of a week.

Unfortunately, attending is rather expensive and may be beyond the budget of many small business owners. I’d be the last to call the $1895 registration fee exorbitant. The value provided is simply too high to leave room for complaints, but the cost will exclude many small business owners.

Fortunately, thanks to Barry Schwartz, you can still sink your teeth into the meat of these sessions without it costing you a dime!

Hang out at Search Engine Roundtable All This Week To Benefit from SES San Jose
Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Roundtable provides such a great service to anyone who can’t afford to attend SES conferences. He assembles a super list of folks to live-blog the sessions so that you can follow what is happening in real-time.

The one thing you may find a little funny when reading the coverage provided by these people is that grammar gets thrown by the wayside, causing the live blog posts to look a bit like a stream of consciousness burst of words. The bloggers have to type very fast to keep up with the speakers. But, who cares about grammar when this great coverage is available to you for free and enables you to understand the key points being made at each of the sessions?

Topics are both basic and advanced, meaning there is something for the beginner and something for seasoned pros, and I eagerly advise any small business owner to be tuning in over the coming week to read about the very latest news, strategies and controversial issues involved in marketing your business online.

Don’t Know Where To Begin?
There are dozens of sessions, and you may not want to read them all. I thought it might be useful for me to list which ones I am going to be paying closest attention to.

Are Paid Links Evil?
This should be an interesting one as one of the speakers is Google’s Matt Cutts, the man who has told us all that Google doesn’t want us to buy links, and one of the other speakers is Michael Gray, a search marketer who makes no bones about voicing his feelings about Google’s potential motives for their policies. I would expect the debate in this session may get rather heated and it should be interesting to see how it goes.

SMO: Social Media Optimization
If you want to learn more about the relatively new phenomenon of Social Media sites like Digg, Reddit, etc., this will be the session to follow. Speakers include Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, and Todd Malicoat – all experts worth paying attention to.

Content is King!
This session will be moderated by Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide, and as she is so in tune with small business owners, I hope the suggestions made for strategizing your plan to deliver better content to your users will be of great use.

User Generated Content & Search
Our pal Matt McGee of Small Business SES is one of the speakers at this session. If you’d like to learn more about compelling your website’s users to generate content for your website, definitely tune into this session.

Universal & Blended Vertical Search
This seems to me like it will be one of the most important sessions at SES San Jose. As you’ve probably begun to notice, Google’s SERPs are no longer solely made up of links to ‘regular’ websites. We’re seeing links to videos, news, local businesses and other types of content. Find out what is going on with this by following this session. The highly-respected Bill Slawski is one of the speakers and that’s reason enough to tune in.

There are so many sessions and you may find some that are of even more importance to you than the ones I’ve listed. I really hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to be a fly on the wall of SES San Jose 2007. In my opinion, this is one of the most exciting weeks in the year!